A reader, who is a home brewer, immediately asks if my objection to Guinness is to the “stout flavour” or to the “water.” Assuming it is to the water, he then asks if I would condemn all light-bodied beers? Ignoring the first question, I reply, that I do not object to small beers, designed and labelled as such, for consumption by children (before we send them to work in the fields). But the idea of a “light stout” is a perverse contradiction of terms and an outrage.
David Warren, “On beer consumption”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-09-07.
December 24, 2020
QotD: Guinness
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December 17, 2020
Henry Ford and the Mass Marketing of Hatred | BETWEEN 2 WARS: ZEITGEIST! | E.07 – Spring 1920
TimeGhost History
Published 16 Dec 2020Racist conspiracies are on the rise in America. But other hysterias are also lessening. Will there be a return to normalcy?
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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Image Research by: Daniel Weiss
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…
Spartacus Olsson
Mikolaj UchmanSources:
Some images from the Library of Congress
Portrait from Bibliotheque Nationale FrancaiseFrom the Noun Project:
– agreement by Vectors Point
– film camera by Chanut is Industries, TH
– cowboy man by Adrien Coquet
– Protest by Juan Pablo Bravo
– Immigrants by Luis Prado
– pair figure skating by Andrei Yushchenko
– singles figure skating by Andrei Yushchenko
– Letter by Mochammad Kafi
– speech by Juan Pablo Bravo, CL
– universe by Icongeek26
– Arrow by IconTrack
– Galaxy By VictorulerSoundtracks from Epidemic Sound
– One More for the Road – Golden Age Radio
– “First Responders” – Skrya
– “Guilty Shadows 4” – Andreas Jamsheree
– “Slow Discovery” – Cobby Costa
– “Try and Catch Us Now” – David Celeste
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Deviation In Time” – Johannes Bornlof
– “Disciples of Sun Tzu” – Christian AndersenArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
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December 9, 2020
The late steam-era boxcar and (a brief) flourish of colour
In his Trains blog, George Hamlin discusses the changing colours of the ordinary railway boxcar in the brief era between post-war prosperity and the economic disasters of the 1960s and 70s:
Pre-war Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic boxcar number 18052 at the Mid-Continent Railway Museum.
Photo by Sean Lamb via Wikimedia Commons.
The advent of streamlining in the 1930s started to blow historic convention with regard to car colors away on the passenger side of railroading, but had little impact on freight operations prior to World War II. Following that conflict, however, some of the industry began to consider livening up the equipment that produced much of the revenue (and most of the profits) from which they derived their economic existence.
Some railroads also adopted more colorful boxcar paint schemes to promote special aspects of their freight service: the B&O had special schemes for both their “Sentinel” and “Timesaver” services; another example was the Missouri Pacific’s blue and gray (the road’s modern-day passenger colors) for their Eagle Merchandise Service. The Bangor & Aroostook had boxcars with red, white and blue horizontal stripes advertising products emanating from their home state, Maine.
Bangor and Aroostook boxcar 6375 in “State of Maine” paint scheme.
Image originally from Panoramio, but no user information provided.Another example was the large fleet of New York Central’s “Pacemaker” boxcars, adorned in a combination of bright red and gray. Early on, the NYC even ran solid trains of this equipment in an expedited service which was designed to re-capture LCL (less than carload lot) traffic from the increasingly competitive motor trucking industry. (Interestingly, the NYC also had a color they called “Pacemaker Green” that was used for the pre-World War II all-coach New York-Chicago service, as well as on the road’s initial orders of non-stainless steel streamlined coaches.)
In the late 1950s, the Central introduced a more radical change, and began painting its boxcars in a Jade Green color (“Century Green”, according to the railroad) that was quite a dramatic change from boxcar red. The Great Northern also adopted a similar shade. CB&Q boxcars still had the same basic hue, but now they came in a brighter version dubbed “Chinese Red”.
By the 1960s, a number of roads had livened up their freight car liveries; the modestly-sized Reading utilized bright green and beige/yellow for both freight cars and locomotives. Late in its career as an independent railroad, the Great Northern adopted the striking bright “Big Sky Blue” for both passenger and freight cars. At its formation in 1976, Conrail adopted “traditional red oxide” as its choice for freight cars, however, sticking with tradition (and reversing the NYC’s earlier efforts).
Great Northern boxcar 138660 in the “Big Sky Blue” paint scheme, delivered September 1967.
Photo by David Pride http://www.davidpride.com/USA/Minnesota/Osceola_11_007.htm
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December 1, 2020
QotD: Elon Musk as a real life Delos D. Harriman
The shock of recognition will, I promise, flip your lid. The story is, inarguably, Musk’s playbook. Its protagonist, the idealistic business tycoon D.D. Harriman, is what Musk sees when he looks in the mirror.
“The Man Who Sold The Moon” is the story of how Harriman makes the first moon landing happen. Engineers and astronauts are present as peripheral characters, but it is a business romance. Harriman is a sophisticated sort of “Mary Sue” — an older chap whose backstory encompasses the youthful interests of the creators of classic pulp science fiction, but who is given a great fortune, built on terrestrial transport and housing, for the purposes of the story.
Our hero has no interest in the money for its own sake: in late life he liquidates to fund a moon rocket, intending to take the first trip himself, because he is convinced the future of humanity depends on extraterrestrial expansion of the human species. (Also, the guy just really loves the moon.)
The actual stuff of the story consists of the financial and promotional chicanery that Harriman uses to leverage his personal investment. Harriman uses sharp dealing with governments, broadcasters, political groups: he plants fake news about diamonds on the moon to blackmail (a disguised version of) the de Beers cartel, and terrorizes companies with the threat of using the moon to advertise for competitors. He is, in short, not afraid to use questionable means to achieve a worthwhile higher end, and does not — Musk haters take note! — recoil from actual fraud.
Heinlein didn’t provide for live broadcasting of his imagined lunar mission, which is almost an afterthought in his Great Man business yarn. TV cameras were, like computers, one of his blind spots. But if he had thought to make Harriman the owner of a fancy-sportscar manufacturing concern, and if he had thought to have Harriman put a car in solar (trans-Martian!) orbit as one of his publicity stunts, that would have been there in “The Man Who Sold The Moon.” Selling the moon is just what Musk is doing. Except the moon is a tad worked-over as a piece of intangible property, so we get Mars instead.
Colby Cosh, “Heinlein’s monster? The literary key to Elon Musk’s sales technique”, National Post, 2018-02-12.
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November 5, 2020
The Range Rover Story
Big Car old account
Published 26 Feb 2019To help me continue producing great content, please consider supporting me: https://www.patreon.com/bigcar
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The Range Rover is the ultimate go-anywhere luxury SUV. It was born out of Rover’s desire to sell more cars in the USA, and its design was a complete accident. So how did a company known for saloon cars and agricultural off-roaders invent a car that created a brand-new market segment?
Much credit for this video has to go to aronline.co.uk for their excellent articles.
#RangeRoverClassic
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October 31, 2020
Modern Halloween costumes show us how wealthy we have become
Richard Lorenc looks back at the “costumes” for Halloween from the 1970s and 1980s to help illustrate how much our general economic picture has improved since those dark days:
While my husband and I were recently struggling to figure out our costumes for this Halloween (and we still don’t have any idea), he pulled up some old commercials on YouTube. The off-the-shelf options that trick or treaters had were, in a word, pitiful.
Basically, costume makers thought it was ok to make a front-only plastic mask (in any color, really) of a character and top it off with a plastic smock featuring an illustration of said character with either its name or the name of the show or movie it comes from. There was no attempt to dress in the character’s actual attire. If you wanted that, you’d either have to know a professional costumer or cobble together something from your closet.
Take a look for yourself at just how costume-poor we used to be:
Obviously, every costume is an opportunity to generate interest in a brand or franchise, and slapping on a logo is an easy way to get a name out there, but these costumes truly heralded a dark time for Halloween. Some may even argue that it demonstrated crass consumerism at its worst, with cynical companies taking the easiest route to grabbing a couple of bucks from desperate parents.
The truth of the tragedy of terrible old Halloween costumes has to do with a simple idea: specialization.
[…]
The next time you compare our screen-accurate store-bought costumes of Darth Vader and Mr. Incredible to those of yesteryear, remember that we enjoy them today not because previous generations didn’t care for accurate costuming, but because growing trade across the globe has generated so much wealth for each of us that we can now demand things we may have only imagined previously.
I only realized as I got ready to schedule this post that it was an article I’d blogged a couple of years back, but the point of the story is still relevant even in our pandemic-wracked economy of 2020.
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October 22, 2020
Are cast-iron vises secretly terrible?
Rex Krueger
Published 21 Oct 2020Cast-iron vises are convenient and popular, but there might be some much better options.
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September 13, 2020
Are the Kielburgers fleeing before the real story breaks?
Ted Campbell listened to an Evan Solomon radio report recently and spells out the key points:
The Kielburgers, he notes are neither newcomers nor naifs. Mark Kielburger is a Rhodes Scholar and Craig Kielburger has, he say, “been rubbing shoulders with politicians since he was 12 years old.” They have, Mr Solomon says, been selling the “halo effect” to politicians and other celebrities, a list which he tells us includes Justin Trudeau, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Erin O’Toole and the “halo effect” says, in effect, if you come out and make us look good then we, being a famous, big-league charity will make you look good, too. It’s all part of an astute marketing plan.
But then Evan Solomon gets to the real question: if Tylenol, he says, can survive a scandal in which people died then why are the Kielburgers reacting so dramatically to what is, really, on the surface, a minor league scandal? So the Kielburgers paid Margaret Trudeau a few hundred thousand dollars to make a few charity appearances, is that such a big deal? I mean the Trudeaus are wealthy, aren’t they? They can’t be bought, can they? Well, most if us don’t have million dollar plus trust funds and most of us didn’t earn $450,000 in speaking fees in a year, but the Trudeau family is unlikely to have just forgotten about $250,000 in speaking fees paid to Margaret Trudeau. Bill Morneau may have forgotten about owning a villa in France, but unlike the Trudeaus, Mr Morneau is rich … really rich. So are the Kielburgers. The commercial property part of their WE empire, alone, is worth $50 Million. Could a few thousands dollars per appearance (she made 28 over four years, about one every couple of months) paid to Margaret Trudeau really threaten the entire WE empire?
[…]
My guess, and that’s all it is, is that there is real fear in the WE boardrooms and in WE’s legal department that Prime Minister Trudeau might be guilty of something more than just conflict of interest. Someone like Pierre Poilievre or the Lobbying Commissioner, for example, might think that further, deeper investigations are needed and those questions might lead investigators to look more deeply into why and how Justin Trudeau and the Kielburger brothers, themselves, cooked up the idea of WE Charity running a multi-hundred-million-dollar government programme and then trying to cover-up the whole thing.
Might those questions be enough to bring Justin Trudeau down?
Might those questions be enough to threaten the Kielburgers’ fortunes, even their freedom?
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August 30, 2020
QotD: Capitalism
The women who significantly object to this are already buying men’s version and so the bastards get to market segment. Between those who care more about money than cut – they’re paying the same as the men – and those who care more about the cut than the money are paying more. If all women cared more about the money then they wouldn’t be able to do this.
It’s exactly the same reason that causes pink razors to cost more than blue. People will pay the extra so why the hell not try it on?
Yes, this really is insisting that its women’s own fault. If some significant portion didn’t pay the extra then no one would try to charge it.
Capitalism really is very simple.
Tim Worstall, “Why Do Women Pay More For T-Shirts? Because Women Will Pay More For T-Shirts”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-05-25.
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August 6, 2020
QotD: Selling booze to the immature
I am, by the way, fully aware of how innovation works — that most of civilization has occurred because someone, somewhere said: “Y’know, I bet if we just changed …” — but that’s confusing improvement with extension. Tinned fruity-flavored gin is not an improvement.
I know that raspberry-flavored beer may have caused more people to take to beer drinking, but that’s changed things, and not for the better. Go into any bar and look at what beers are on tap these days. Barely a drinkable one available, and worse, they’ve pushed all the decent beers into bottles (or out of stock) while hipsters and chickies are catered to with the latest fad, Strawberry IPA [pause to be sick].
Basically, booze manufacturers are changing their products to appeal to people who don’t like booze. In the old days of marketing, we used to call that pointless endeavor “catching eels” (try catching an eel in mid-air when someone tosses it in your direction and you’ll see what I’m talking about). Not only is it pointless, it’s mercurial because what’s popular today won’t be popular tomorrow as your fickle new customers chase after the next “Flavor Of The Month”, and you’ll have gone from catching one eel to catching multiple eels. That’s something they don’t teach in the Marketing section of the typical MBA course because MBAs are all about theory (“line extension”, “product enhancement”, etc.). And don’t tell me I’m talking nonsense because I’ve seen the curricula.
Kim du Toit, “Gilding the Lily #268”, Splendid Isolation, 2018-05-24.
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July 16, 2020
QotD: The young Herbert Hoover
His father died when he is 6, his mother when he is 10. The orphaned Hoover and his two siblings are shuttled from relative to relative. He spends one summer on the Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma, living with an uncle who worked for the Department of Indian Affairs. Another year passes on a pig farm with his Uncle Allen. In 1885, he is more permanently adopted by his Uncle John, a doctor and businessman helping found a Quaker colony in Oregon. Hoover’s various guardians are dutiful but distant; they never abuse or neglect him, but treat him more as an extra pair of hands around the house than as someone to be loved and cherished. Hoover reciprocates in kind, doing what is expected of him but excelling neither in school nor anywhere else.
In his early teens, Hoover gets his first job, as an office boy at a local real estate company. He loves it! He has spent his whole life doing chores for no pay, and working for pay is so much better! He has spent his whole life sullenly following orders, and now he’s expected to be proactive and figure things out for himself! Hoover the mediocre student and all-around unexceptional kid does a complete 180 and accepts Capitalism as the father he never had.
His first task is to write some newspaper ads for Oregon real estate. He writes brilliant ads, ads that draw people to Oregon from every corner of the country. But he learns some out-of-towners read his ads, come to town, stay at hotels, and are intercepted by competitors before they negotiate with his company. Of his own initiative, he rents several houses around town and turns them into boarding houses for out-of-towners coming to buy real estate, then doesn’t tell his competitors where they are. Then he marks up rent on the boarding houses and makes a tidy profit on the side. Everything he does is like this. When an especially acrimonious board meeting threatens to split the company, a quick-thinking Hoover sneaks out and turns off the gas to the building, plunging the meeting into darknes. Everyone else has to adjourn, the extra time gives cooler heads a change to prevail, and the company is saved. Everything he does is like this.
(on the other hand, he has zero friends and only one acquaintance his own age, who later describes him to biographers as “about as much excitement as a china egg”.)
Hoover meets all sorts of people passing through the Oregon frontier. One is a mining engineer. He regales young Herbert with his stories of traveling through the mountains, opening up new sources of minerals to feed the voracious appetite of Progress. This is the age of steamships, skyscrapers, and railroads, and to the young idealistic Hoover, engineering has an irresistible romance. He wants to leave home and go to college. But he worries a poor frontier boy like him would never fit in at Harvard or Yale. He gets a tip – a new, tuition-free university might be opening in Palo Alto, California. If he heads down right away, he might make it in time for the entrance exam. Hoover fails the entrance exam, but the new university is short on students and decides to take him anyway.
Herbert Hoover is the first student at Stanford. Not just a member of the first graduating class. Literally the first student. He arrives at the dorms two months early to get a head start on various money-making schemes, including distributing newspapers, delivering laundry, tending livestock, and helping other students register. He would later sell some of these businesses to other students and start more, operating a constant churn of enterprises throughout his college career. His academics remain mediocre, and he continues to have few friends – until he tries out for the football team in sophomore year. He has zero athletic talent and fails miserably, but the coach (whose eye for talent apparently transcends athletics) spots potential in Hoover and asks him to come on as team manager. In this role, Hoover is an unqualified success. He turns the team’s debt into a surplus, and starts the Big Game – a UC Berkeley vs. Stanford football match played on Thanksgiving which remains a beloved Stanford football tradition.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.
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June 1, 2020
How to be a Pirate 🏴☠️
CGP Grey
Published 30 May 2020‣ Adapted largely from The Invisible Hook. It’s great, go read it: https://amzn.to/36PLKSE
‣ Thank you, my Patrons, for making this video possible: https://www.patreon.com/posts/37699725## Special Thanks
Peter T. Leeson for reviewing a draft of the script. Check out his newest book, WTF?!: An Economic Tour of the Weird: https://amzn.to/3eEMm09
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May 25, 2020
QotD: Sociopaths and politicians
The key thing about the modern sociopath is the ambivalence toward the truth. They think saying something is the same as doing something. What matters is if the words get the listener to do what the sociopath wants them to do. Standing in front of crowd, making false claims, is fine if it causes people to buy product. If the truth sells more product, then the truth is better. From the perspective of the modern sociopath, the difference is about the results, not the accuracy of the statements. The truth or a lie, whichever works.
Now replace “sociopath” with “politician” and “product” with “votes” and you have the modern managerial democracy. It’s not that our politicians lie. It’s that for them, a lie is indistinguishable from the truth. That’s why they seem so utterly shameless. Shame requires a sense of right and wrong, a knowledge that what you said or did is intrinsically wrong. For the people who rule over us, right and wrong only exist in the context of their own ambitions. Something is “right” if it benefits the person in the moment.
“The Z Man”, “Rule by Sociopath”, The Z Blog, 2018-02-21.
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May 23, 2020
QotD: Computer trade show tchotchkes
You can see them staggering back to their hotel rooms, arms full of corporate-branded freebies, where they have prepared an empty suitcase specifically for shipping it all back to their BOFH Central at the end of the show.
Sure, it’s all crap. It’s usually the likes of childish desk toys, cable tidies that will snap within the week, pencils and logo-shaped erasers (as if you use such items all the time, right?), and Swiss army knives that will be routinely confiscated as you pass through airport security for the trip home. No matter, just turn up to the expo and companies will toss gifts at you like you were the GitHub messiah taking a seaside donkey ride into sysadmin Jerusalem.
Well, nobody tosses any in my direction. No blotchy ballpoint pens for me. No evil-smelling pads of sticky-notes that don’t stick to anything. No spongey stress balls. No smartphone stands. No sharply angular keyfobs that stab into my bollocks when I sit down.
Me, when I visit an IT exhibition stand on the cadge, I have to provide evidence of my media accreditation, two forms of photo ID, an electricity bill, birth certificates of my family going back four generations (originals only, please) and a DNA swab before I qualify to receive a boiled sweet.
Alistair Dabbs, “‘Don’t tell anyone but I have a secret.’ There, that’s my security sorted”, The Register, 2020-02-21.
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May 7, 2020
QotD: Chestnuts
Which is why they have been fed to pigs, these last few hundred years; that, and the appalling propaganda mounted against chestnuts by our culinary elites. The European poor once ate them in quantity, as their filler; made bread from chestnut flour. Italians, harder to intimidate by fashion than most others, still adore their subtle flavours.
These thoughts were occasioned by a sealed bag of peeled chestnuts, casually purchased the other day as a snack while walking. They were candied in a rather disagreeable way. But worse, I unfortunately failed to read the label attentively, or would have noticed that the contents were “organic”. No intelligent consumer will buy anything on which this warning is prominently displayed. Quite apart from the doubling or tripling of the price, the product itself may be missing some important ingredient.
Children raised on “organic” food become weak and sickly. Those raised “vegan” as well are likely to die. If you find a child perishing in this way, be merciful and fill him with meat and chestnuts.
David Warren, “Chestnuts”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-01-29.
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